I am a bit of a newbie so please forgive any mistakes I might be making. I want to summarise what I think the current situation with the Dreamplug is.

Right now we can boot up the DreamPlug and

1) back up the uImage file in /media/usb to a USB drive (say /media/usb4)

2) do "dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/media/usb4/rootfs.img bs=4M" to back up the root file system as an image file

This backs up the uImage file and the root file system.

But we don't have a way of backing up u-boot and there doesn't seem to be a way of getting a backup u-boot image file (yet) from GS.

Right now we can install gcc and then download the latest u-boot sources and then compile a new u-boot. But right now we don't have a way of installing in onto the Dreamplug or restoring the old u-boot if the newer one does not work properly.

1) go to sheeva-with-linux.com and get an uImage file for kernel 2.6.37.12) get the modules.tar.gz for 2.6.37.13) load these onto a USB stick with the root.fs.img file that we generated from our dreamplugs internal sd card

then we could do something like (by changing our boot arguments)

usb startfatload usb 1 0x6400000 uImage

I think this would allow us to boot with the newer kernel and then we would log in as root, cd / and extract modules.tar.gz from the USB stick using tar xvf

I extracted the Dreamplug repository and found that etc/debian_version contains "5.0" but my Dreamplug shipped with "5.0.3"

The repository software seems different from what my Dreamplug shipped with.

Does anyone know exactly how to use the repository? Do I just take a USB flash drive and then create two partitions on it and then install uImage into the FAT partition and then copy the repository files into an ext2 partition and then run the dreamplug using boot parameters set to read from the USB drive?

I just got mine yesterday. but I think the process you descibe is about right. kernel need to be on fat partition since u-boot does not support ext2load. as long as you set the root=sdb2 or better yet, label the second partition after your format it then you can use root=LABEL=your_lable_name to boot.

Good I was little bit of worry about the "saveenv" not working because the dreamplug is base on spi/NOR which the main stream u-boot is not clear on supporting kirkwood. you sure when you boot up u-boot did not said something about environment CRC error using default?

I tried to use the files in the Dreamplug repository but I could not get it to work. This is what I did:

1) formatted a USB drive with a fat partition and an ext2 partition2) copied the uImage file into the fat partition3) copied the files from the dreeamplug_rootfs archive into the ext2 partition4) changed uboot to fatload the uImage from the usb stick5) changed uboot to boot from the usb drives ext2 partition

Booting starts but ends with a kernel panic that says:Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.